Code is the new concrete
The future of architecture and urbanism according to multidisciplinary collective Xcessive Aesthetics
The use of data has been normalised into everyday life, laws, markets and cultural norms. Who are the stakeholders and who controls and benefits from data collection and technological innovation? The built environment is the next area to be targeted by big tech. How will architectural practice adapt and survive in a world where algorithms are increasingly replacing human processes and design is just part of a streamlined equation for profit-making and monopolisation?
As a collective practice, Xcessive Aesthetics aim to respond critically to advances in technology and issues around data ethics, which are increasingly embedded within and shaping the transformation of the built environment. In our view, the future of the profession means engaging with digital networks, data politics and the power of the virtual. If code is the new concrete, how can we be active agents in the shaping of cities and facilitate public engagement with the processes of design and infrastructural development?
In the context of emerging digital technologies and highly challenging concerns over data collection and manipulation, the architectural profession must broaden its scope to the digital as well as the physical and challenge the conventional structures of procurement, client-architect hierarchy and development models. Architecture is increasingly become a more collaborative enterprise manifesting in the interaction of different systems, reflected in the BIM model of digitally managing design and construction between different contributors. Architects face challenges such as decreased control over the construction process and an emphasis on value engineering over design quality, due to the rise of design and build contracts, hyper-commoditised land and profit-driven urban development. Competition culture, encouraging architects to work overtime without pay and undercut each other for desirable projects, leaves little room for a traditional architectural practice to balance creative fulfilment with financial stability and ethical principles.
Xcessive Aesthetics aims to move away from this traditional model of practice, seeking a more nuanced approach to architecture in the technological age. Seeking out collaborators rather than clients, from arts institutions to tech start-ups, our projects are driven by critical research and creative output that varies from the physical to the virtual and everything in between. Our output spans many scales, but is geared towards public engagement and experimental interventions and installations rather than solid buildings, reflecting the nature of the virtual processes we are interested in. Operating at this scale frees up our ability to critique, to engage with popular culture and to explore emerging digital tools. However, our projects hold the potential for significant and lasting impact by facilitating intervention and consultation in the development of code and regulation around public space and data in the built environment.
Our practice operates at the intersection of the virtual and the physical and occupies a space between tech development and the construction sector, maintaining a critical distance from both. As a multidisciplinary collective, our members include those qualified as architects but also those who are primarily artistic practitioners and those with backgrounds in coding and interactive design. We aim to expand our skill sets as necessary depending on the nature of each project, with continuous learning at the heart of our practice, whether that means learning a new coding language or expanding our knowledge of law and policy-making. By consulting and collaborating with experts in different fields we will ensure that architectural input plays a role in tackling technological dilemmas, engaging actively in the code-as-law-making that will shape future cities.
Architecture and the built environment are the next space to be targeted by technological transformation and the power and profit that comes with it. Tech companies that have become the undercurrent of global influence in industry, politics, social interactions and commerce are now looking towards the built environment as a space for expansion and further monopolisation. Having made explicit their desire to dominate the smart home market, Amazon made their first investment into a home-building start-up in 2018, following the launch of their Alexa-powered smart home devices which include a microwave and a voice-controlled amp. Alphabet, meanwhile, is making a claim on the whole city, with its Sidewalk Labs project aiming to integrate data flows and smart technologies and design the model neighbourhood of the future. The level of influence and control that comes with the design of embedded technologies and algorithmic governance, often disguised by the rush for convenience and short-term benefits, will play out in significant and sinister ways if not challenged early on. Bianca Wylie argues for the right to privacy which surveillance smart technologies are infringing upon. As architects and urbanists we are in a position to critique the rapid development of tech-integrated cities using our design skills and urban knowledge that the tech approach lacks. While tech giants are used to operating in an unregulated space, the well-established procedures of urban planning should be invoked and expanded to help to empower citizens in the process of urban tech transformation, through community engagement, advocating the protection of human rights such as privacy (in relation to embedded surveillance tech) and measures against financial monopolisation of smart services.
The interaction between the digital and physical holds great potentials as well as problems; applying ideas from one to the other could radically transform the city. The utopian aspirations of the early internet as a benevolent, decentralised, user-generated, bottom-up, uncensored space hold inspiration. The protocols and legislation behind the notional structure of the internet and the processes of developing code can be seen as a model for shared infrastructure that could inform an approach to space in the physical city. Dubravka Sekulić argues in ‘Legal Hacking and Space’[1] that the drive for legislation in favour of free sharing of software code in the 1980s, a response to the imposition of intellectual property law compared to the enclosures of the commons, can be translated as a model for urban space that challenges the laws of private ownership and the increasing commercialisation of public space. Contrastingly, the increasing digitisation of the urban realm through tools such as Google maps, Citymapper and Uber is imposing a new commercialisation of space as data, where movement through the city is dictated by algorithms and citizens’ behaviour is tracked and translated into information that can be capitalised on.[2]
Simultaneously as technologies have a more embedded presence and impact on physical space, human experience is becoming increasingly virtual. Our experience of urban space is filtered through virtual layers and social media engagement while online interaction makes geographical location less and less significant. There are huge opportunities that come with the development of the virtual sphere. While the early utopian ideas of cyberspace have become distorted and twisted by conflicting forces at play in online freedom and privacy, the immersive experience of this space is becoming a reality with the advance of virtual reality and mixed reality technologies.
Xcessive Aesthetics operates as a practice on two levels: critical research into the social and political impacts of data and smart technologies on one hand, on the other creative experimentation and engagement with the virtual sphere, utilising emerging digital tools, as a space of empowerment and social innovation. As virtual space becomes more important, virtual architecture holds huge potential for investigative and speculative design, democratisation and collective dreaming. Our proposal for the Serpentine Augmented Architecture competition explored the concept of a collaboratively designed virtual city experienced via augmented reality (through a smartphone app) in Hyde Park. Setting the parameters for building in virtual space raises interesting questions over regulation and ownership of space, safety, privacy and freedom.
We are working to develop the AR in the Park concept into a real installation, potentially working in our local borough and engaging with the council, local businesses and arts institutions. We have already made contact within Southwark planning department about the potential for such a project. Through this interaction we learnt that Southwark council are incorporating a section on digital infrastructure into its planning policy, as well as their digital strategy which lays out plans to become a digital council and issues such as digital inclusion and access to infrastructure.
The impact of emerging technologies on urban experience and personal freedom ranges from the scale of minor park regulations to geopolitical systems; Xcessive Aesthetics investigates these issues from the micro to the macro, addressing big questions whilst engaging with people at a small, local level. The practice is founded on a commitment to thinking carefully and critically about the embedded social impacts, human rights implications and dangerous biases in data-driven development. We aim to engage with citizens on issues of data ethics and the transformation of urban space caused by new technologies through playful installations. In doing so, we can be active agents in the processes that are already taking hold of our cities and infringing on human rights in the unregulated realm of smart technologies. By generating discourse and interaction at the intersections of data and architecture and actively driving thoughtful legislation in a forward-thinking manner, we can have a say in the new codes which will define the future of our cities.
[1] ‘Legal Hacking and Space’ by Dubravka Sekulić, in The Right to the City: A Verso Report (London, New York: 2017).
[2] ‘An Informational Right to the City?’ by Joe Shaw and Mark Graham in The Right to the City: A Verso Report (London, New York: 2017).
